ANETHUM FOENICULUM /08.08.15/
8:12 AM
A LETTER & A SHORT STORY:
For you, trapped in an amber casing.
Stop counting pennies and nickels and the scratches on the bottoms of tap shoes, weighing teaspoons of dust and hoping they're from the stars, blue sky, good intent, just this, just so. Somewhere along the way, you stopped writing poetry and started writing laundry lists and self-help manuals and comedies and tragedies (which turned out to be the same thing), again and again, until your ribs were sore and they couldn't decide whether to protect or betray. Your heart might have fight enough to leap up and out between your teeth if you weren't gritting them so hard.
When the gardener of sixty years to a royal family of a small european principality was twelve years old, he spit in his mama's tragic flower garden two months before she died. He sat at her deathbed, stroking her dying hair and eyelids with white fingertips; he did not cry on the outside. He is seventy-eight years old now, and the crown princess asks him what loneliness is. He vaguely points to a flower bed, mutters its botanical name, and walks away. Snow falls and the flowers die.
Seize the swell and collapse of life.
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